Please don’t confuse the Jacobites with the Jacobins
I’ve just finished a six-week evening course at London’s City Literary Institute on the subject of “The Making Of The United Kingdom 1603-1801”.
There was frequent reference to the Jacobites. These were people who remained loyal to the Stuart dynasty in exile, headed by the Catholic James, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 which brought the Protestant William and Mary of the House of Hanover to the throne of England and Scotland. The word comes from the Latin word for James which is Jacobus.
Then there are the Jacobins. This is the name given to the political radicals from the 1790s and it was derived from the Jacobin Club of 1790-1794. This club was the best known and the most influential of the political clubs which appeared in France during the French Revolution and British radicals were commonly sympathetic to some of the French revolutionaries.
So now you know.